What Country Friends Is This? The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, the Tempest by William Shakespeare (review)

Led by director David Farr, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) staged a cycle of three Shakespeare plays titled What Country Friends Is This?, including The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest. Also referred to as The Shipwreck Trilogy—a shipwreck is vital to the plot of each play—the trilogy formed part of the World Shakespeare Festival 2012 held in the UK as part of the cultural component of the 2012 Olympic Games. The festival aimed to explore what Shakespeare's plays tell us about interactions among different cultures, and with The Shipwreck Trilogy, the RSC intended to consider issues of migration, exile, dislocation, crossing borders, and the discovery of brave new worlds. While the company stated that each of the plays was enjoyable alone, it also suggested that theatregoers should see them as a trilogy for the "epic journey" to work best.

Given that the thematic links among the three plays—including an early, middle, and late play from Shakespeare's oeuvre—are tenuous, the RSC's choice was a brave one. For the first time in theatre history, these three plays would be grouped together with one ensemble and one vision; although there were two directors, Farr (who directed Twelfth Night and The Tempest) and Amir Nizar Zuabi (who directed Comedy), the three plays fell under the artistic responsibility of the former, who used doubling as a device to enhance understanding of the individual plays and to create resonances among the three. But although it aided in creating the intended epic journey, the doubling served less to forward the narrative or raise larger issues of migration, exile, and dislocation than to convey growing complexity and ambivalence in the characters and their relationships through added layers of meaning carried over from previous plays.

Felix Hayes (Dromio of Ephesus) and Bruce Mackinnon (Dromio of Syracuse) in The Comedy of Errors. (Photo: Keith Pattison.)

The simplest form of doubling used in What Country Friends Is This? was functional doubling, whereby the actor served a similar function in more than one play. Some of these doublings carried across two plays, as with the officers in Comedy, who then appeared as officers and members of Orsino's court in Twelfth Night. The officers in Comedy were portrayed as brutal thugs who seemingly enjoyed the cruel treatment of foreigners, one of whom was actually shot onstage, and so their recurrence in a similar role in Twelfth Night reminded the audience of past unpleasantness and raised the potential for brutality and xenophobia in Orsino's court. Another example of functional doubling was visible in the roles of actor Jan Knightley. In Comedy, he began as the sea captain who helped smuggle Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse into the hostile port of Ephesus; in Twelfth Night, he portrayed Antonio, the sailor who helps Viola come to land in Illyria; and in The Tempest, he played the boatswain. In all three plays, the actor appeared at the start of the play, wore the same blue-and-yellow oilskin coat, and played the same type of character—an older, rough, blunt, grim-faced though honest and reliable seaman concerned for those under his protection. This recurring character-type remained one-dimensional, however, negating the possibility of deeper, more ambiguous explorations of character, including, for example, Antonio's homosexual potential in Twelfth Night.

The trilogy also used relational doubling—that is, repeated echoes of interactions among actors in the same relational roles—across several plays. The four actors (Stephen Hagan, Kirsty Bushell, Jonathan McGuinness, Emily Taaffe) who played the two couples in Comedy—Antipholus of Ephesus and Adriana, and Antipholus of Syracuse and Luciana—reemerged in Twelfth Night as Sebastian and Olivia and Orsino and Viola. This use of doubling reflected particularly on the relationship between Sebastian and Olivia...